Scars
by Map of my mind
Summary: Her memories are written on her skin.


A/N I don't own anything.

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Scars tell a story. The story of our lives. Well, the worst parts of our lives really. Some aren't that significant, like the ones you get while cooking or the scrapes on you knees from the last time you tripped. Some tell tales of adventures that took you places you never thought you would go, some just tell of accidents, things that just simply went wrong. But some tell of nightmares, places that you never wish to return to and wished you had never been. Real places that shouldn't be real but you bear the proof of their existence on your skin.

Katniss had those kinds of scars. She would forever wish to forget, would do all that she could to never think of the things she had seen and done. She doubted anyone in the world deserved to remember such terrible events.

No one was brave enough to say but she could admit (just to herself) that her mind was broken, that it hadn't survived the war like her body had. She couldn't pinpoint a moment and if anyone asked she would say it was the moment she lost Prim but it was clear even then that she wasn't all there. She hadn't been for some time.

She would never complain though because the cracks in her mind allowed the memories to leak out. And slowly, painfully slowly, she forgot the horror of the war... and the games.

The only problem was that her body was still marked, her scars still told the stories that she wished to forget.

Strangely she did want some scars. Like the ones she received when she was 7 and cooking dinner (sort of) with her father and she accidentally touched a pot of stew that was far too hot to touch. It was a happier time and one that she wanted to remember. But the Capitol had taken that from her, after her first games they had morphed her into their idea of perfection and the scars (and the memories that went with it) had to go.

Then there was time she went hunting and got caught in one of Gales traps. She had been stuck for hours and that was how they met. The ropes that caught her left a thick line around her ankle but it was gone (the Capitol took that mark to). And after what happened to Prim she didn't know whether to be glad about that (she guessed she partly was).

After that though came the harder ones, the burns and the knife wounds and always the pain. The Capitol of course took care of them after the first games but somehow despite the cracks in her head she could still see the exact shape and size they were and exactly how she received them. Even her broken mind wouldn't let her forget them.

Then came the second games. It was agonising and unexpected and she had been reckless because she simply hadn't planned to get out. But then she had and HE didn't and everything went to hell from there. All the scars after that stayed. Every last one. They were still there, telling the story of the war.

It was all there mapped out on her skin. The fights, the bombings and the fires. The things that she wanted to forget the most were etched into her skin forever. And after the fall of the Capitol and the take over of district thirteen there wasn't even the slightest chance of her having them removed.

She wasn't vain. Never had been, but she wanted to forget and in her broken mind removing the scars would be a step in the right direction, never mind that she could still remember perfectly well the few (relatively speaking) that had already been removed by the Capitol.

She hated them and so she hated herself. For the longest time she refused to look at herself in the mirror for fear of having fash backs. Flashes back to the first games or the second or worse still, the war that followed them. She wouldn't talk to anyone either, refused to leave the house and found that she couldn't even bring herself to get up from bed most days. The pit she was in grew deeper day by day and her mind lost a little bit more of its awareness with each minute that passed.

But after all that Peeta came back and he wouldn't leave. She slowly came back to herself, (the parts of her that were left) well he brought her back and found that he was just as scarred as she was.

Surprising both of them, even after all that had been done to him, he still managed to fall in love with her all over again but it wasn't pretty and they constantly questioned the reality of the present. He too had flashes of the war but the war he remembered was totally different to the one that she did. Their minds had been virtually trampled on by the Capitol so it was only natural that their accounts of what happened during the rebellion were utterly unique from the other's despite the fact that they went through mostly the same things.

A place without war seemed foreign to them and they found themselves fighting when they no longer had to. It was difficult for them to find a place in the world now that they didn't really have a purpose, now that there was no rebellion to fight. But somehow they managed.

They created new memories together, better ones. Ones without hunger, sickness or death. And together they found that their scars were a tribute, to those who died. Because the scars refused to let them forget. Together they found that their minds were broken but they were still there and though they lost a lot through the cracks, they found that as one unit they could manage just fine.

He worshipped her scars at night, worshipped HER and it made her realise that they were a part of her. And though her mind was broken the scars remembered what she couldn't. Because the scars were her memories, her mind made visible on her skin.

Somehow they moved on, they even had children together. But Peeta never truly shook off the mind control, he asked if things were real almost every day and she never went near fire. Ever.


End file.
